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Extracts from the "The Open Society and Its Enemies Volume 2:
Hegel and Marx" by Karl Raimund Popper (Originally published 1945)"Bertrand Russell described this study, with its companion volume on Plato, as ' a work of first-class importance which ought to be widely read for its masterly criticism of the
enemies of democracy, ancient and modern. His (Popper's) attack on Plato, while unorthodox, is in my opinion thoroughly justified. His analysis of Hegel is deadly. Marx is dissected
with equal acumen, and given his due share of responsibility for modern misfortunes. The book is a vigorous and profound defence of democracy, timely, very interesting, and very well
written."

"The only response is to become aware of unconscious prejudices which
condition our interpretations of the past. In ideological terms this is
extraordinarily difficult. Most of us are hardly aware of the ideological
preconceptions which frame our perceptions of other societies. This task is
made harder when present day concerns impose their own distortions. In 1818
the poet Shelley translated Plato's Symposium. After his death his
widow wished to publish it, but was advised by the poet and essayist Leigh
Hunt that this would only be possible if she changed 'unacceptable words'
like 'lover' into 'friend', 'men' into 'human beings', and
'youths' into 'young people'. This use of political correctness was
an attempt to conceal the fact that Plato was writing explicitely about
homosexual (pederastic, in fact) experiences. Every period had its own
taboos, the present one among them. Most are essentially ephemeral, and the
historian with an eye to his or her future reputation has to be careful
he or she does not become ridiculous by distorting his or her text to conform
to them

[TEXT DELETED]

No understanding of the ancient world is possible if societies of two thousand
or more years ago have to be shaped to meet present-day political concerns.
(See further Robert Hughes's trenchard analysis of political correctness,
The Culture of Complaint.)

"Virtually every page that follows conceals some controversy over which academic blood
has been shed. However, it is worth the effort to produce a single-volume overview
which, used with caution, may provide the springboard into
further study of these fascinating societies."

"It is also arguable that social stability was, in fact, maintained by occupying
and feeding the many peasants who worked on the great building projects during
the months of the floods. Within Egypt at least there does not seem to
have been the callous brutality so often found in other societies."

"One of the great discoveries was the vast library of the
Assyrian king Assurbanipal in Nineveh with its collection of Mesopotamian
literature. The cuneform script in which the tablets were written was
deciphered eventually by an Englishman, Henry Rawlinson (1810-95), from
a trilingual inscription carved by the Persian king Darius on a rock at
Behistun. The literature and complex history of the region could now
start to be unravelled. In the late 19th century the British
archaeologist Flinders Petrie pioneered the use of stratigraphy in Palestine."

"At some point (scholars have put forward dates as early as 1300 BC and as late as
1000 BC), the Phoenician cities developed their own alphabet, and probably
transmitted it to the Greeks in the ninth or eigth century BC."

"Like most imperialists of the period the Assyrians could be brutal. The plundering
of cities and the crushing of peoples was followed by the deportation of the
survivors. However the empire could not have survived as long as it did if
this had been its only strategy."

"Minoan society has had its enthusiastic admirers. The colourful frescos, the
apparant joy and sophistication of the people, the sense of peaceful and
ordered society which revelled in the beauties of nature, have been combined to
create an image of an idyllic world. In her book The Dawn of the Gods (1968)
the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes argued that Minoan Crete was essentially a femanine
society, in contrast to thos more masculine culture to the north. There was
something of a shock in 1981 when the Anemospelia sacrifice was found and
a darker side of Minoan life emerged. There is some evidence too that war played
a far larger part in Minoan life that was once thought. The 'carefree' Minoans
may turn out to be no more than a fantasy created in the twentieth century."

"The varied arguments of the early Greek thinkers were invigorating but deeply
unsettling. Faced with the seeming absurdities of Parmenides' deductions,
philosophy could be dismissed as no more than an intellectual game. It could be
argued that 'truth', if the concept could be said to exist at all, was something
relative, dependent on the inadequate senses of individual observers or the ways
in which they constructed their reasoned arguments. In the sixth century
another Ionian, Xenophanes, had already made a similar point in a famous
statement about the gods:

Immortal men imagine the gods are begotten and that they have human dress and
speech and shape . . If oxen or horses or lions had hands to draw with and to make
works of art as men do, the horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, oxen like
oxen, and they would make their gods; bodies similar to the bodily shape they themselves
each had. (Translation: E. Hussey)

If the gods, to take Xenophanes' example, are the construction of human
minds, it is a short step to argue that other concepts - goodness or justice, for
instance - might also be. The fundamental question is then reaised as to whether
there could ever be any agreement over what the gods, or justice or goodness,
might be. This was to be the central issue tackled by Socrates and Plato in the late
fifth and early forth centuries. (see pp. 227.)"

[TEXT DELETED]

"What cause this intellectual breakthrough in Greece? In a famous article of
1963 Goody and Watt related it to the coming of literacy:

A great many individuals found in the written record so many inconsistencies in the
beliefs and categories of understanding handed down to them that they were impelled to
a much more conscious, comparative and critical attitude to the accepted world picture
and notably to the notions of Gods, the universe and the past.

This argument suggests that once evidence had been written down and a variety
of different accounts of an event or a belief could be compared, then rational
thinking developed as a way of dealing with the inconsistencies.

Goody and Watt's argument, like so many interpretations of the past, was
rooted in contemporary debates, those of the 1960s. The guru of the period was
the Canadian Marshall McLuhan with his stress on the medium (book, film, or
television, for instance) as the conditioner of the message sent out. Television,
argued McLuhan with some justification, imposted its own form on the information or
programmes it transmitted. The use of writing in the world's first literate
society, Greece, could, similarly, have had as significant an impact on ways of
thinking. Goody and Watt's view is now out of favour. The written word is as
likely to be a force for conservation as for liberation. What was written down -
in ancient Egypt, for example - often achieved a sacred quality simply becuase it was
in written form. The Egyptian doctor would allow his own observations and
recommendations for treatment to be guided by the texts he had inherited. They
certainly did not encourage him to think rationally about the diseases he was
treating.

Goody and Watt's view also implies that the early Greek philosophers had
access to a variety of different texts. This certainly seems to be well beyond the
truth. The scholar who sits down and masters a number of different texts before
coming to his own conclusions appears only in Hellenistic times. Aristotle
(384-322 BC) is the first human being recorded as having a library. In the sixth
and fith century BC the number of texts available was very limited. They could
not be read easily. Public inscriptions, for instance, were often produced with no
word-spacing or punctuation, and when a law was changed the new version was simply
tacked on to the end of the old. Longer texts, of poetry or history, seem to
have been composed as aids to memory, and were seem as inferior to the
spoken word with all the emotional possiblities it offers in performance.
Both Socrates and Plato vastly preferred the cut and thrust of oral debate as an
appropraite way to conduct argument.

In her Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece Rosalind Thomas stresses the
continuing primacy of the spoken word, in the sixth and fifth century at least.
It may be more productive to look within Greek society itself for the development
of rational thought and, in particular, at the way that the Greeks interacted
with each other orally."

[TEXT DELETED]

"Solon talks of justice as an abstract principle which can be discussed rationally
and introduced into a political system through the actions of men. Abstract ideas
are not only becoming accessible, but are being debated without fear of inciting the
warth of the gods.

The end reslut, and one which is fundamental, was that there were few inhibitions
on enquiry. The success of Greek philosophy lay in its critical and
argumentative approach to an extraordinary range of questions. As Bernard Williams
has pointed out:

In philosophy the Greeks iniated almost all it major fields - matephysics, logic, the
philosophy of language, the theory of knowledge, ethics, political philosophy and the
philosophy of art. [Williams here is only referring to the concerns of modern
philosophers - he might have added mathematics and science, included as 'phiolosophy' by
the Greeks.] Not only did they start these areas of enquiry but they progressively
distinguished what would still be recognised as many of the most basic questions in
those areas.

It is worth noting that Williams concentrates on the Greeks as question askers/
They did not always come up with very effective answers. There were good reasons for
this. First, their speculations often ran ahead of what their senses could cope
with. It is sobering to realize that no Greek astronomer had any
means of exploring the heavens other than his eyes. (There wer instruments
developed for measuring angles, but tey still depended on the naked eye
for this use.) Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation, the idea that life
could come from nowhere, which lingered on as a misconception until the seventeenth
century, arose largely because he had no way of seeing small objects. Not the
least of the Greeks' philosophical achievements was, however, to recognise
this inadequacy of the senses. The fifth-century philosopher Democritus got
to the core of the problem when he constructed a dialogue between a mind and
the senses. 'Wretched mind, taking your proofs from us (the senses), do you overthrow us? Our overthrow will be your fall.'

'Early Greek philosophy', writes Martin West:

was not a single vessel which a succession of pilots commanded and tried to steer
towards an agreed destination, one tackling one way, the next altering course in the
ligh of his own perceptions. It was more like a flotilla of small craft whose
navigators did not all start from the same point or at the same time, nor all aim for the same
goal; some went in groups, some were influenced by the movements of others, some
travelled out of sight of each other.

In short, the Greek world of the sixth century fostered an intellectual curiosity
and creativity which took many forms. The Archaic age deserves to be seen as
one where a particular atitude of mind took root, perhaps, as has been suggested,
because of the intensity of life in the polis. It involved the search for
an understanding of the physical world free of the restraints imposed by those
cultures which still lived in the shadow of threatening gods. It was still a
fragmented world, hoever, one in which cities survived precariously on the limited
resources available. Its vulnerability was now to be tested by attack from the
east by the largest empire the world had yet seen, that of Persia."

"The Athenian citizen was thus given identity through a range of shared activities
which went well beyond his involvement in the Assembly

In contrast, life if Sparta seems uniform and regimented. It pays to be
cautious in saying this because Sparta was often deliberately presented, by noth
admirers and detractors, as a contrast to Athens and so what was different about
the city might be unduly emphasized. The Spartans also made it difficult to
estrablish the truth about themselves. They prided themselves on presenting an
inscrutable face to the world and in hiding their true military strength. Anton
Powell, in an overview of the life of Sparta, suggests a comparison with Mao Tsetung's
China, 'where the movement of foreigners was restricted, communication
with outsiders was guarded, while much that was reported derived from the
uncheckable accounts of enthusiasts'.

What cannot be denied was that Sparta was a city which idealized the state
over the individual and concentrated on breaking down any activities or
relationships which threatened the cohesion of the community. The process of socialization
began at the age of 7 with the removal of a boy from his family. Platon
remarked that all education in Sparta was carried out through violence rather
than through persuasion and the emphasis was on producing hardiness through
endless tests of self-reliance and endurance. At the age of 20 the boys joined
messes, the syssitia. These were, in effect, the only associations recognised by the
state and they provided a totalitarian social world. The messes ate together
nightly and there was no distinction between young and old, rich or poor. It
seems, though the direct evidence is slight, that homosexual relationships were
the norm. Certainly there was little scope for any other form of physical affection.
Men could marry, but until they were 30 all visits to their wives had to be
conducted stealthily by night. (There was an interesting ritual relating to the
consummation of marriage. On the marriage night the bride was dressed in a
man's cloak and sandals and laid in an unlit room to await the attentions of her
bridegroom. The deflowering of a woman dressed as a man may, it has been suggested,
marked a formal transition from the homosexual work of the mess
to that of the heterosexual.)

The state inculcated its own values, related to its need for survival as a military
machine. The greatest glory was to die in the service of the state. The families of
those who had died appeared to rejoice even after a defeat. Survivors, on the
other hand, were shunned. There were two from Thermophylae. When they
returned to the close society of Sparta both were humiliated and one even committed
suicide. Action was valued above words. The Athenian politician Pericles
puts it well when he talks of the Athenians as superior to the Spartans because
they did not think that words 'damaged' actions as the Spartans did. The
Spartans were famous for their brevity of speech (the word 'laconic', from the
Latin for Lacadaemon, the country of Sparta, derives from this source). It is also
interesting to not that they had little use for literacy. Only on classical inscription
has been discovered in Sparta itself, and writing seems to have been reserved
for the recording of international treaties.

Propaganda became an essential part of maintaining the public facade of the
Spartan state. With so little respect given to words, it was expressed visually,
particularly in the display of her troops. Their hair was kept conspicously long and
they were dressed in indentical red cloaks. (The historian Xenophon remarked
that the Spartan army seemed so consist entirely of bronze and scarlet.) Their
numbers were always kept a closely guarded secret. Other states grasped the
importance of deflating this proud image. When the Spartans were finally
defeated at Leuctra (371 BC), the Thebans exposed their dead separately so that
all could see they were not invincible"

"Many sources written by Athenian men suggest that the seclusion of Athenian
women within the home was total, but this cannot be the whole truth. In comedy
women are portrayed outside the house (and thus available for erotic adventures),
but a distinction need to be made between those how had to go outside,
to fetch water, for instance, and those of higher status who had slaves to do tihs
form them but how nevertheless enjoyed other relationships, particularly with
other women, outside the home. (The distinction was symbolized by a woman's complexion.
Women who had to share the work on farms or who had to leave
the home to work or fetch water for themselves betrayed their lower status by
their sunburned skin.)

Watever the reality of women's lives, they themselves have left little record of
it. They they speak, above all in tragic drama, they do so through men's voices.
What women really felt as tey sat together in the women's quarters of the
cramped and probably smelly houses which were typical of urban Athens is
unknown. They may have taken some satisfaction in their status as citizens and
mothers of citzens-to-be. On the other hand, they may have yearned to enjoy
the freedom of the hetairai, the courtesans who attended the syposia
and who sometimes established stable relationships with young aristocrats. (However
successful in the short term, however, the hetaira's life depended on here looks
and charm. She was vunerable to pregnancy (and the child could never be
recognized as a citizen) and disease, and when her lover married she would be
discarded)."

"A distincton has to be made between pederasty, as described above, and
homosexuality. For a greek male to accept the submissive role in a homosexual
relationship, or to be paid for this role, was considered so degrading that, in
Athens at least, it resulted in the loss of citizen rights. As a surviving vase painting
showing the victory of the Greeks over the Persians at the battle of
Eurymedon (early 460s BC) suggest, one of the rights of a victor was to inflict sexual
humiliation on those he had defeated.

For the older man pederasty always to have ceased with marriage, and
older lovers were simply seen as ridiculous. 'What kind of life is there,'
wailed the sixt-century poet Mimnermos, conscious above all of his failing sexual powers:

without golden Aphrodite, the goddess of love, May I die when I no longer take
any interest in secret love affairs, in sweet exchanges and in bed. These are the flowers of
youth, pleasant alike for men and women. But when painful old age overtakes a man
and makes him ugly outside and foul-minded within, then wretched cares eat away at
his heart and no longer does he rejoice upon the sun, being hateful to young
men and despicable to women. (Translation: Robert Garland)

The death-rate in ancient Greece, through childhood illness, death in battle,
shipwreck, or disease, must have been high, but many Greeks survived into old
age. Solon claimed that a man was at the peak of his intellect and power of speech
between the ages of 42 and 56. Plato lived until he was 80, while the playwright
Sphocles was still writing a year before he died aged 91. The rhetorician
Gorgias, reputed to have lived to over 100, attributed his longevity to a meagre
diet. (Certainly the normal Greek diet of oil, cereals, and fruit was a healthy one
and modern Greeks have the highest male life expectancy in the EC.) Some even
found joy in being a grandparent. One fifth-century grave-marker commemorating
a dead womand called Ampharete is inscribed, 'I am holding the dear child
of my daughter, which I did when we both looked on the rays of the sun, and now
that we have both passed away, I hold her still upon my knees.'

An so on towards death. For those who died young there was a desire to die
nobly so that burial could take place publicly with all due hounours. There was a
complete contrast with Egypt, where the preoccupation was with the survival of
the body and possessions into another world. The Greeks cared more for their
posthumous reputations, and the preservation fo the body had no importance.
The rituals of death were simple and moving. the body was washed and anointed in
olive oil, then wrapped in two layers of cloth. A vigil was held at
which songs of mourning would be sung and the body taken in procession to the
cemetary. Here its final resting place was marked by a tone stele or even a statue
of the dead man for those who could afford one.

In the words of an unknown poet,

Then he will lie in the deep-rooted earth
and share no more in the banquet, the lyre,
or the sweet cry of flutes.
(Translation: Oswyn Murray)"

"The outbreak of a war which was to end twenty-seven years later in
Athen's defeat was a turning-point in the city's history. (It is covered in Chapter 15.)
There was a new mood of pessimism, symbolized by a devastating plague which
broke out in the city in 430. In the despair that followed, the Assembly turned
against Pericles, fined him, and deposed hime from his generalship (although he
was soon re-elected, 'as is the way with crowds', remarked Thucydides). He
died in the summer of 429 of some lingering illness probably related to the plague."

"Aristophanes was writing at a time when
Athens was at war and he yearns for peace, presenting the past as more civilized
and noble than thte present. It is hard to summarize his political view
because his targets are so varied, but he shows nostalga for the early days of
democracy, a time when he considered that the 'people' were wiser than they had
since become. Cleon, the dominant political figure in Athens after the death of
Pericles, is portrayed in the Knights as a slave to an unsteady and stupid old man,
Demos (The People), who is happy only when he is given handous. Euripides is
derided for betraying the traditional conventions of tragedy, while philosophers
receive short shrift for undermining conventional beliefs by #clever' intellectual
questionings."

"Debates could become heated and volatile, particularly when the city was
under stress during the Peloponnesian War. A famous example, recounted by
Thucydide, was the debate on the treatment of the people of Mytileene after
the city had revolted against Athens in 427. At first the Assembly, swayed by
impassioned oratory, decreed that all the Mytilenean men should be executed and the
women and children enslaved. A trireme was sent off with the order. The next
day the Assembly, in more sober mood, reversed the decision. (A second trireme
reached the city in the nick of time.) In 406 there was a debate over the fate of the
generals who after a naval victory at Arginusae had left the scene without picking
up survivors (their defence being that a violent storm had made this
impossible). Various proposals were put forward as a means of assessing their guilt,
some of which appeared unconstitutional. The mass of the Assembly shouted
that the decision should be left to the people, even if this meant
disregarding normal procedures, and went on to order the execution of those six
generals who had arrived back in Athens. Later, however, but only when it was too
late, the Assembly again repented of its harshness."

"Aristophanes' play the Clouds was produced for the first time in 423. It is a satire on
comtemporary philosophy. A dissolute old farmer, Strepsiades, has heard that
philosophers can make even a bad case appear dood and he is determined to have
his son learn how to do this so as to get his own back on his creditors. Part
of the play takes places in a school where students engage in all kinds of
meaningless intellectual exercises and where it is taught that Zeus does not exist and it
is the clouds instead which produce thunder and rain.

The Clouds reflects the arrival of philosophy in Athens in the fifth century.
BEfore this philosophers appear as isolated fitures each following his own path.
(See Chapert 9.) There was no coherant intellectual discipline of philosophy, and
many of the early thinkers were as much poets or historians as philosophers in
the modern sense of the word. By the fifth century, however, there were men who
wandered from city to city teaching young men how to use their minds and
voices in public service. They were known as the sophists (from sophizesthai,
'making a profession of being inventive and clever') and democratic Athens was
quick to use their services.

At first the word 'sophist' was a neutral one, referring to anyone who had
exceptional talent, but the word was later used by Plato and Aristotle in a derogatory
sense. For them the sophists were those who debased the true phiolosophy by
presenting it as a series of intellectual tricks which might be taught for money.
The Sicilian Gorgias, a brialliant orator who visited Athens in 427, was attacked
by Platon for being able to present the arguments both for and against any
motion, thus showing no reverence for objective truth. Aristophanes' attacks on
the sophists were in the same vein.

Plato's attack seems rather unfair. The fifth century was a sceptical age and
many believed that truth was somethign that could not be found. Gorgias would
hardly be criticized for teaching what were in effect the skills needed for the
nurturing of democracy. (See Josiha Ober's argument, referred to earlier, that it was
just these rhetorical skills which ensured the stability of Athenian society.)
Moreover, many of the sophists had real intellectual breadth. Hippias of Elis,
who was in Athens in the late fifth century, was able to offer instruction in
astronomy, mathematics and music. Prodicus of Ceos, another visitor, analysed
the meaning of words and could be said to have laid the foundations for the
study of linguistics. These men were not simply purveyors of second-hand ideas.
The sophists can also be creidted with pioneering the study of religion as a
social and anthropoligical phenomenon. The Milesians had suggested that there
was some divine principle at work in the universe. Heraclitus had agreed.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, the first philosopher recorded as living in Thanes and
a friend of Pericles, put the matter more explicitely when he wrote, 'All living
things, both great and small are controlled by mind (Nous . . . and the kinds
of things that were to be and that once were but now are not, and all that now is and
the kinds of things that will be - all these are controlled by Mind.'
(Translation: E. Hussey) This 'mind' was omnipresent and eternal.

The sophists were more sceptical. Protagoras, who wsa born at Abdera in
Thrace about 490 BC and probably spent most of his life as a travelling teacher,
paying several visits to Athens, summed up his doubts as follows: 'Convering the gods
I am unable to discover whether they exist or now, or what they are like
in form; for there are many hinderances to knowledge, the obscurity of the
subject and the brevity of human life.' (Translation: W. Guthrie) Protagoras;
response to this uncertainty was to proclaim, in a famous outburst of optimistic
humanism, 'Man is the measure of all things.' It could be taken as the slogan of
democratic Athens.

Other sophists when further. Prodicus suggested that the gods originated in
man's experience of nature. They had been created as personifications of natural
phenomena such as the sun and the moon, rivers, water and fire. The Athenian
poet Critias, in a fragment preserved from a play Sisyphus, developed the
theme. 'I believe', he argued, 'that a man of shrwed and subtle mind invented for
men the fear of the gods, so that there might be something to frighten the wicked
even if they acted, spoke or thought in secret.' (Translation: R. Muir) In other words,
the gods were purely a human creation, designed to keep men in order.

By the end of the century, however, free thinking on religious matters was less
tolerable. Optimism was not possible in an age of plague and military defeat, one
which saw the destruction of the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 413 and the
defeat of Athens by Sparta in 404. It was natural for conservatives to see these
disasters as the revenge of the gods on those who had slighted them. Already, in the
430s, a decree of the Assembly had allowed public prosecution of both those who
did not admit the practice of religion and those who taught rational theories
about the heavens. Protagoras was forced to flee Athens and was drowned on his
way to Sicily."

"The central character in the Clouds was none other than Athen's most celebrated
contemporary philosopher, Socrates. (Since he did not charge for his teaching he
cannot strictly be called a sophist, although Aristophanes was happy to brand
him as one.) Socrates was born in Athens in 470 BC and had spent almost all his
life in the city, although he seems to have served as a hoplite on occasions in the
Peloponnesian War. He played virtually on part in politics, claiming that to have
done so would have compromised his principles. (In the Apology, his defense
against his accusers in 399, he claims to have risked his life by refusing to oey
the government of the thirty Tyrants.) He was clearly a rather isolated, self-centred
figure, capable of withdrawing from all human contact and for this reason
vunerable in a city where public participation was so highly valued.

Socrates himself wrote nothing and there are three main sources for his ideas.
The first, Aristophanes' portrayal in the Clouds, is probably distorted by
the demands of comedy. The historian Xenophon provided some Memorabilia
which arose from direct personal contact with Socrates, but by far the most
important source, and virtually the only one for Socrates' philosophy, is Plato.
Although the range of material is rich and wide-ranging, it too has its limiations.
Plato was forty-five years younger than Socrates and only knew him in the
closing years of a long life. Socrates is always allowed to speak directly, but it is
often difficult to distinguish what are Socrates' own thoughts and what are
Plato's. (Plato's works are termed 'Dialogues' becuase Plato records conversations
in which Socrates is usually the dominating speaker. They are conventionally
divided into three groups, the Early, Middle, and Late Dialogues. Socrates
appears in almost every one of the Dialogues but it is assumed that Plato's views
predominate in the Middle to Late Dialogues and that Plato has moved away
from any historical portrayal of Socrates.

For Plato Socrates was a hero. He is presented as someone who lives for philosophy
itself, searching for truth without regard for material gain, in the
end dying for his beliefs. These beliefs centre on the human soul and its search
for 'the good'. The soul is not just a disembodied spirit, argues Socrates, it is hte
character of a person, an integral part of his personality. It can be corrupted by
the glamour of the world and has to discover for itself that there is something
called 'the good' which can be grasped through the use of reason. Once 'the
good' has been found the soul will recognize and be naturally attached to it. In
effect Socrates was shifting the attentions of philosophy away from attempts to
understand only the physical world towards something very different, individual
self-discovery. This was a new start in the history of philosophy, and in recognition
of this all earlier thinkers are conventionally described as 'Pre-Socratic'.

The first step to finding 'the good' is to recognize the limitations of one's
present life, and this means examining the conventions by which it is lived. ('An
unexamined life is not worth living' is perhaps the most famous of Socrates's statements.)
In the typical Socratic dialogue, Socrates allows the person he is talking
to to express a view, about bravery or friendship, for instance. Socrates then
breaks down the statement, showing how one example of friendship is inadequate
as a means of understanding the essence of what friendship means. In one
dialogue Socrates talks with the general Lackes in an attempt to define bravery:

SOCRATES (to LACHES). I wanted to get your opinion not only of bravery in the hoplite
line, but also in cavalry engagements and in all forms of fighting; and indeed of
bravery not only in fighting but also at sea, and in the face of illness and poverty and
public affairs. And there is bravery not only in face of pain and fear, but also of
desire and pleasure, both fearsoem to fight against by attack or retreat - for
some men are brave in all these encounters, arne't they Laches?

LACHES. Yes, certainly.

SOCRATES. Then all these are examples of bravery, only some men show it in pleasure,
some in pain, some in desire, some in danger. And there are others who show cowardice
in the same circumstances.

LACHES. Yes,

SOCRATES. Now what I want to know was just what each of these two qualities is. So
try again and tell me first, what is this common characteristic fo courage which they all
share? Do you understand now what I mean?

LACHES. I am afraid I don't.

(Translation: Desmond Lee)

Socrates assumes that there is a concept, 'bravery', which is somehow there
waiting to be discovered by reason. Discovery would lead to there being real
knowledge of what bravery is, at a level beyond that held in the opinions of
ordinary men in the sense that the knowledge could be defended rationally.
However, in the Dialogues Socrates seldom reaches this point. Socrates even suggests
that it is not his job to provide this kindof knowledge. It has to be discovered
by the individual for himself. (It could not, therefore, be taught.) In the
Theaetetus he is recorded as follows: 'I cannot myself give birth to wisdom, and
the criticism which has so often been made of me, that though I ask questions
of others I have no contribution to make myself because I have no wisdom in me,
is quite true.' On another occasion Socrates said that his wisdom lay in the fact
that he was the only man who fully realized his ignorance.

It is clear from this that the experience of meeting Scorates must have been
both inspiring and frustrating. Here is the portrait given in Plato's Symposium
by a drunked Alcibiades:

When I listen to him, my heart pounds. . . it's a sort of frenzy. . . possessed . . . and the
tears stream out of me at what he says. And I can see a lot of other people that he's had
just the same effect on. I've heard Pericles, I've heard plenty of good speakers, and
I thought they did pretty well, but they never had an effect like this on me. My sould
wasn't turned upside down by them and it didn't suffer from the feeling that I'm dirt.
But that's the feeling I get from him and I know very well, at this moment, if I were
prepared to lend him my ears, I couldn't hold out, he makes me admit that when there's
so much I need, I don't look after myself.

(Translation: Kenneth Dover)

It was probably inevitable that Socrates would get into troble in the deeply
unsettled times of the late fifth century. In 403 the democrats had just regained
the initiative in the city (after the rule of the Thirty Tyrants) and their suspicions
of Socrates rested partly on his association with discredited aristocrats such as
Alcibiades. Socrates made it quite clear that he regarded popular opinion as
something inferior to the reasoned finding of intellectuals. However much he
professed that he himself was ignorant, the charge of intellectual elitism was
bound to stick. The actual charges of 'corrupting the young' and 'neglect of
the gods whom the city worships' brought by a number of his enemies in 399 may
have been trumped-up ones but they reflected the ineasiness of a city where
communal values continued to be strongly valued and religious sensitivities
remained acute.

There is no evidence that Socrates' accusers were out to put him to death. The
normal penalty would have been exile. However, Socrates was in no mood to
compromise and he even argued before the jury that the city should be supporting
him at public expense for his contributions to its affairs. In the version
recorded by Plato he put his case clearly and consistently but seems only to have
aroused greater anger among the listeners. They eventually voted for the
death penalty. (There is another tradition that Socrates said little at his trial.)
According to Plato, Socrates met his end calmly, sharing his
thoughts while the hemlock steadily spread through his body. Plato's accounts of his
last days have left one of the most enduring images of Western cultural and political history.
As the American journalist I. F. Stone suggests in his Trial of Socrates, the
issures involved, community versus the individual, 'truth' and knowledge versus
popular opinion, continue to 'torment' (Stone's word) the liberal conscience,
although Stone himself argues that Socrates was elitist and an enemy to democracy.
"

From Aeschlus to Aristotle

The legacy of Plato and reference to Karl Popper's "Open Society and its Enemies"

"Platon said relatively little in The Republic about the nature of the state which
would finally emerge. It would appear to be joyless and authoritarian. Good government
must not be swayed by emotion, so poetry and music are forbidden.
Children are to be held in common. Sex life is to be limited, with an emphasis on
eugenic breeding. The rulers must expect no gain from their position other than
the satisfaction they obtain from establishing and enforcing truth. Politics, in the
sense of debates between different power groups over the direction of the state,
simply have no relevance (since once the Forms of justics and goodness, for
instance, have been grasped there can be no further argument about their
nature)."

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"Western philosophy, wrote the mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead,
'consists of a series of footnotes to Platon'. Certainly Plato's legacy is a
profound one. All those who believe that there is a reality beyond the physical
world which embodies value, a view which entered Christianity via the Neoplatonists
and St Augustine (see Chapter 28), fall within the Platonic tradition. Those who
do not see any evidence of such a reality fall outside it. It is a
crucial divide and it mirrors the divide between those who accept the possibility
of moral absolutes and those who do not.

The legacy of Plato so far as political thought is concerned is, inevitably,
controversial, 'What is out ultimate aim? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and
equiality, the reign of eternal justice, who laws are engraved, not in marble or
stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in that of the slave woh forgets them and
of the tyrant who rejects them.' This statement appears to be set well in the
Platonic tradition. It is, in fact, a speech of Maximilien Robespierre made at
the height of the French Revolution, a speech which foes on to justify terror against
all those who oppose the establishment of a Republic of Virtue. As Karl Popper
has argued in his The Open Society and its Enemies, Plato represents a direct
threat to the democratic tradition, and any ruling elite which claims that it has
the right to impose its own ideals on society is his heir."

"The poets of the period seemed to enjoy a private world of intimacy based on
friendship, nostalgia, and scholarship. Their poetry is self-conscious literary.
The comparison has been made with the twentieth-century poets T.S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound. Some of the mood has been captured in William Cory's famous, if
not strictly accurate, translation of Callimachus' lament for his dead friend
Heracleitus:

They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are they pleasant voices, they nightingales awake;
For Death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

Callimachus (c.310-c.240 BC) was the most influential of the poets of the
period, a particular favourite of the Romans, including Catullus and Ovid. He
was a man of learning, responsible for a massive 120-volume catalogue of the
library of Alexandria and a supposed 800 volumes of other works. He set a tone
for the age, one striving after good taste and refined scholarship in an
unashmedly elitist way. His Hymns, of which six survive, were elaborate compositions
designed to be read among discerning friends, while his epigrams, such
as the most famous to Heracleitus quoted above, deal with his more personal
feelings, including his love for boys. It was his range, versatility, and lively intelligence
which made him the archetypal poet of the age, and he is more quoted in
this period than any other but Homer."

"The same uncertainty prevaded moral philosophy. The question which
haunted the philosophers was how to live 'a good life'. The question was given a
new focus by the disappearance of so many of the traditional roles which life in
the small city had provded. One response was that of the Cynics, to withdraw
from the world altogether, renouncing material possessions and turning social
convensions upside-down. The founded of Cynicism, Diogenes, reputedly asked by
Alexander the Great what he wanted out of life, requested no more than that
Alexander get out of the way of the sun.

The two major figures of Hellenstic philosophy, Epicurus and Zeno, came
from Samos and Cyprus respectively but it was to Athens that they were drawn
to teach. Both tried to find meaning for the individual in an age of angst. For
Epicurus, who lived in Athens from 307 until his death in 271, the world was one
in which the gods had little of no influence. He followed the materialist philosopher
Democritus (see p. 144) in believing that the world was composed of
atoms and that those making up each individual dissolved when that individual
died and then regrouped to make up other objects. All that could be known much
be based on observation and experience of this world. The only purpose of this
life is to ensure survival in this world through pleasure. By this Epicurus did not
mean a frenzied search for sensual enjoyment but rather peace of mind and freedom
from pain. In order to achieve this it was important to escape from any fear
of death to concentrate on the pleasures of everyday living, chief amongst
which Epicurus numbered friendship and rational thinking. 'The pleasant life is
produced not by a string of drinking bouts and revelries, nor by the enjoyment
of boys and women, not by fish and the other items on an expensive menu, but
by sober reasoning'. A retreat from the hectic, competitive life of the Greek world
marked a major reversal of traditional Greek values where a man was judged by
the success of his public life, and Epicureanism was never completely
respectable. However, it proved popular in the last years of Republican Rome
and has not lost its impact today. A recent Italian edition of Epicurus sold a million
copies.

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It used to be the custom to end courses on the Greek world with the battle of
Chaeronea in 338 or with the death of Alexander. The assuption was that after
this date the 'pure' Greek world of the fifth and fourth century was polluted with
foreign influences and thus, somehow, not worthy of the same respect. it is
hoped this chapter has shown that the Hellenistic period is not only fascinating
in its own right but also of real historical significance. It can no longer be
ignored in any comprehensive study of the Greek world."

"One of the themes of De Republica is Cicero's preoccupation with the duty of
citizens, in particular those of the richer classes, to uphold high standards of personal
morality and to take an active part in government. Others in these troubled
times too a different path and were attracted by the philosophy of Epicurus
with its emphasis on withdrawl from private life and a concentration on personal
qualities of friendship (see p. 291). They took their inspiration from one of
the great poems of the period, De Rerum Natura, 'On the Nature of Things', by
Titus Lcuretius Carus (98-c.66 BC).

Virtually nothing is known about Lucretius. He was clearly a passionate
admier of Epicurus and much of De Rerum Natura is devoted to praising the
man who freed the human race from superstition and religion and the fear
of death. In what Alexander Dalzell had called 'one of the rarest of literary
accomplishments, a successful didactic poem on a scientific subject', he also
managed to expound the atomic theory of Epicurus. (In fact this is the fullest
account of the atomic theory to have survived.) Yet the whole poem is also
infused with a richness of the natural world and contains a non-theological
explanation for the development of life, with grass and shrubs appearing first
and then the first animals from the wombs in the earth. Even in the early brutish
period of humanity's development there is room for human affection and
friendship, one of the sherished beliefs of Epicureanism. Lucrestius never allows
his rational approach to the physical world to erase an emotional response to its
riches. Seldom has a system of beliefs been expressed so powerfully and with
such imagination in what is one of the few original works of Romain philosophy.

Lucretious' sensuous approach to life is echoed in the poems of another of the
'voices' of the period, Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.84-c.54 BC). Catullus came from
a wealthy family in Veronal but moved south to join in the literary circles of fashionable
Rome. Like any 'modern' poet of the day he was steeped in Greek literature
and among his surviving works are translations of Sappho and Callimachus.
While drawing heavily on the metres and legends of Greece he was versatile
enough to develop a voice that was entirely his own. In his own time he was best
known for his erudite and finely crafted poems, such as the short epic 'The
Wedding of Peleus and Thetis', which require an understanding of Greek myth
to achieve their fullest impact. (The marriage is described in sensuous detail as
the height of happiness but the educated reader knows that the child of the
marriage, Achilles, is doomed to die young.)

The modern reader has, however, been attracted by Catullus' record of his
experiences in the 'bohemian' circles of late republican Rome. His poem detail
the characters which surround him with all their eccentricities, pretensions, and
betrayals. The most celebrated is Lesbia, the woman he loved and lost. 'Lesbia'
is probably Clodia, the sister of the dissolute Publius Clodius. The affair is detailed
from its first rapture to the despair of rejection.

You ask Lesbia, how many kissings of you are enough and to spare for me. As great
the number of the sands of Libya to be found in silphium-bearing Cyrene between Jove's
torrid oracle and the sacred tomb of legendary Battus; or as many the stars which in the
silence of the night behold the stealthy loves of mankind: so many kisses to kiss you
would be enough and to spare for love-crazed Catullus, too many for the inquisitive to
be able to count or bewitch with their evil tongues.

As he is betrayed he bitterly asks his friends to

take back to my sweetheart a brief and not kind message. Let her [Lesbia] live and be
happy with her lovers, three hundred of whom at once she holds in her embraces, loving
none truly but again and again ruptering the loings of them all; and let her not count
on my love as in the past, for through her fault it has fallen like a flower at the meadow's
edge, after being lopped by the passing plough. (Translations by T.P. Wiseman)

This is the world of the sophisticated, erudite, and the malicious. Catullus is
adept at sending off obscenities to those he dislikes. (Even Caesar who was
rumoured to have had a homosexual relationship when young in the east, was
the target of a lampoon.) There is also the genuine anguish of an age where personal
relationships have become shallow and transient. These are the private
voices of an age of uncertainty."

"The changing mood towards Caesar can be seen through the eyes of Cicero. He had
agaonized over which side to take in the civil war and had then chosen
Pempey's. Once Pompey had been defeated he threw himself on the mercy of
Caesar, who treated him iwth clemency and consideration which remained
one of his most attractive qualities. Cicero had hoped against hope that Caesar's
rule might lead at last to the stable and united republic of which he had dreamed.
In a speech in the senate in late 46 he praised Caesar for his generosity and ability
to bring a reconciliation to the state. Yet, although he never lost an admiration
for Caesar as a man, he inevitably became disillusioned with the stifling of political
life as Caesar's behaviour became more overtly monarchical. After his
daughter Tullia died he wrote a moving letter to a friend Servius Sulpicius which
set out his despair:

Now I cannot escape from the sorrow of my home into public affairs, and find anything
in them to console me, whereas I always had a place at home to cheer me
up when I came home depressed from public life. So I'm not at home, and I'm not in
public life; my home cannot console me for the sorrow I feel fro the free Republic, nor
can public life compensate for the grief I feel at home. (Translation: Elizabeth
Rawson)

Fortunately Cicero's intellectual powers remained intact. In his misery he set
himeslef the task of presenting the fruits of Greek philosophy in Latin for an audience
which could not read Greek itself. There was also a personal motive,
seen in one lost work, Consolatio, of trying to come to terms with his grief
through exploring his emotions through the similar experiences of others. These
final works of his life tackled epistemology (Academica), the ultimate aim of life
(De Finibus), the nature of the gods (De Natura Deorum), and moral philosophy
(De Officiis), with shorter works on friendship and old age. Many concepts
proved untranslatable into Latin and Cicero had to coin words to express them.
Words such as 'quality', 'essence', and 'moral' (qualitas, essentia, and
moralis) all appear for the first time. In these works Cicero's prose achieved a
range and precision which made it a model for those who came after him.

In his exposition of philosophy Cicero adopted a tone of intellectual detachment.
(it was exactly this which made these final works so influential. In the long
centuries when original Greek texts were uknown in Europe theyf ormed the
only substantial record of Greek philosophy.) He believed in countering superstition
by reason yet at the same time doubted whether there was such a thing as
certainty. In so far as he warmed to any school of philosophy it was to Stoicism
with its emphasis on endurance and commitment to public life for the good of
all. While he was prepared to believe in some form of divine being, Cicero felt
that the traditional gods of Rome and the variety of new gods which were
entering Rome from Egypt and the east were no more than human creations, of real
use only to the credulous."

"Seneca is remembered as the most articulate proponent of Roman Stoicism.
As has been seen (p. 291), the Stoics saw the world as one community, a single
brotherhood, evolving under the benevolent care of a presiding force. The individual
was both part of this force and yet also subject to it. Within a framework
which he could not control he nethertheless had a role in helping to bring the
whole to fruition. Unlike the Epicureans, for instance, the Stoic had a duty to
take part in public life, to uphold the moral order when he could, and to endure
the unfolding of events when he could not. This philosophy fitted well with traditional
Roman ideals: service to the state, whatever the cost, frugality, and
respect for the divine order. Virgil's Aeneas is a model of the Stoic virtues of
courage, loyalty, resolution and piety.

Stoicism was essentially a conservative and paternalistic phiolosophy. Stoics
were expected to treat their slaves well but there was never any suggestion
slavery itself should be abolished in the name of the brotherhood of man. Yet
Stoicism could also inspire resistance. The model of the Republic was Cato of
Utica (95-46 BC), who was unflinching in his defence of the senate and republican
ideals, committing suicide when he heard of Caesar's triumph over the old order.
Later Stoics offered resistance to those emporers who seemed determined to
upset the natural evolution of the world by their tyrannical behaviour. Both
Nero and Domitian were to face opposition of Stoics (though it has long been
debated as to whether Stoics resisted becuase they were Stoics or became
Stoics to steel their resistance.)

The Stoic could appear stern and unbending. The importance of Seneca is that
he humanized Stoicism. (Some, looking at his great wealth and his enjoyment of
power under Nero, argue that he was all too human.) He wrote voluminously
and not only on philosophy. His works include poetry and tragedies as well as
scientific tretises (his main work on science, Naturales Questiones, was an
undisputed authority until the works of Aristotle were rediscovered), and even
a satire on the reign of Claudius. His philosophical works deal with such topics as
anger, clemency, and what is meant by happiness. It is in his letters to his friend
Lucilius, 124 of which survive, that he is most approachable. They present the
ideals of Stoicism in an easy conversational style and relate them to actual events,
the destruction of the city of Lyons in a fire, the everyday treatment of slaves, and
how to deal with the unsettling effects of large crowds."

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